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In his new novel Critical Mass (which will be given away to everyone who subscribes or renews for at least 6 months through January), Whitley Strieber describes how easy it would be to smuggle a nuclear device into a major city and use this to blackmail a country into adopting Sharia law. Now it turns out that future terrorism may not need a bomb at all: A keyboard will do.

“Carry out all my demands or the entire country’s electricity will be cut off.” Is this a line from a thriller, or is it a possible threat made possible with a computer keyboard? The next step in terrorism is the attempt to cause damage to systems that are operated by computer networks, such as financial systems, power stations, hospitals, television broadcasts, and satellites.
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At this month’s 215th meeting of the American AstronomicalSociety inour nation’s Capital, two researchers at the LosAlamos National Laboratory presented an idea that might throw thephysicscommunity for a loop. There may be something in theuniverse faster than light itself. (If you got our FREE weekly email newsletter, you would have already read this story! To sign up, click here).

John Singleton and Andrea Schmidt pushed the limits of thespeed of light theory, suggesting that while no ‘mass orinformation’ may travel any faster, waves of light couldpossibly pass through certain pulsars, or fast-spinningstars,faster than the speed of light.
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When I was a kid, there was a strip in the comics section about a wise possum named Pogo. His most famous statement was “We have seen the enemy and he is us.” I see some of the current political movements the same way: We seem to be shooting ourselves in the foot when it comes to things like health care. It reminds me of those old Westerns, where a bad guy in a black hat would fire a gun at the ground, making some hapless cowboy “dance,” but in this case, we’re doing it to OURSELVES.
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Don’t live in the South – Medical researchers call the South the “stroke belt,” because people born there have a higher risk of dying from stroke as adults, even if they later move away. Remember, it’s not LIVING there that’s the problem, it’s being BORN there. However, those who were both born in the stroke belt AND lived there as adults have the highest risk.

Researcher Maria Glymour says, “Our results cannot pinpoint a specific explanation, but they are consistent with other research suggesting that the roots of stroke risk begin in childhood or even infancy.”
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